The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon.

The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go.

A vastness, as a neighbor, came,—A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home,— And so the night became.

This poem is in the public domain.

Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) is considered a major American poet, though she was not accorded this honor until well after her death, when her younger sister discovered and began to share the enormous body of work that Emily left behind. A recluse who almost always wore white, Emily was born to a prominent Massachusetts family and spent the bulk of her life inside her home in Amherst. Only seven of her poems were published during her lifetime, and virtually none were published as originally written until the mid 1950s. (Emily’s odd punctuation, capitalization, and formatting did not meet with standard publishing “approval” for earlier editions.) There is a whimsical nature to many of her poems, although the subject of death was the most frequent recurring theme.